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South Korean comfort women suing own government

Some 123 former Korean comfort women who served the US troops after the Korean war are suing the South Korean government in a bid to reclaim their human dignity. Kim Sook-ja, 76, was one of the women who were trained to serve as prostitutes.Reuters

The women said they were forced to undergo degrading checkups for sexually transmitted diseases and if the test was positive, locked up until they were "fit" to work again.

One of these comfort women, Cho Myung-ja, 76, (below) said: "To make sure we didn't pass on some disease to foreigners, we were tested twice a week, and if it looked abnormal, we would be locked up on the fourth floor, unlocking the door only at meal times, and some people broke their legs trying to escape."

Working through the 1960s and 1970s, the women said they were treated as commodities used to boost a post-war economy.

Patriots then, Forgotten now

The 'comfort women' said the government ran classes for them in etiquette and praised them for earning dollars when South Korea was poor. One former prostitute Kim Sook-ja, 70, said: "They say we were patriots at the time, but now they couldn't care less.

"We didn't fight with guns or bayonets but we worked for the country and earned dollars."

Afterwards, they said they were neglected and forgotten. They were left to live out their lives in poverty and stigmatised for having worked as prostitutes.

Now, hundreds of former prostitutes continue to live clustered around military bases in South Korea, many of them ill and poor, without family and financially unable to relocate.